Ulysses ad – Saturday Review 2-10-1934 pp 474-475
Posted here (PDFs above) is an advertisement for James Joyce’s Ulysses, which (the advertisement) is now in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University.
The advertisement is dated 1934, the year in which a ban on the book was lifted, enabling its publication by Random House. The advertisement was published in the Saturday Review of Literature, February 10, 1934.
— posted by Roger W. Smith
July 2022
I am posting what I believe to be a very rare item, which I have copied at the New York Public Library:
CONTEMPO Volume III, Number 13
James Joyce Issue (edited by Stuart Gilbert)
February 15, 1934
I was alerted to this issue in the following article: “ ‘Ulysses’ Arrives in the United States: A Perspective from Eighty Years Ago.” By Richard J. Gerber, James Joyce Quarterly, Fall 2013, pp. 163-167.
As Gerber explains, Bennett Cerf’s Random House published one hundred copies of Joyce’s Ulysses in January 1934 in order to secure its copyright in the United States. U.S. District Judge John M. Woolsey had ruled that the book was not pornographic, enabling the book’s publication.
Contempo was a so called “little magazine” offering literary and social commentary. It was published only for three years, between 1931 and 1934. Samuel Beckett, T. S. Eliot, and Eugene O’Neill were among the authors featured. Ezra Pound served as the magazine’s foreign editor. In addition to the James Joyce issue, Contempo published special editions devoted to work and criticism by and about William Faulkner, Hart Crane, and George Bernard Shaw. The editors of Contempo asked Stuart Gilbert, one of the first Joyce scholars, to serve as guest-editor for their final, special edition devoted to Joyce.
CONTENTS:
James Joyce’s “Work in Progress [published as Finnegans Wake],” Part I
Random House co-founder Bennett Cerf’s “Publishing Ulysses”
commentary by Stuart Gilbert, one of the first Joyce scholars: “We’ll to the Woods No More”
Modern Library advertisement for its editions of Joyce’s Dubliners (1926) and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1928)
Richard Thoma, “A Dream in Progress,” a discussion of “Anna Livia Plurabelle” (a character in Finnegans Wake)
Samuel Beckett’s acrostic poem “Home Olga.” based on Joyce’s name and written in 1932
William van Wyck’s “To James Joyce, Master Builder,” a poem in tribute to Joyce
Eugene Jolas’s “Verbirrupta for James Joyce,” a parody of Finnegans Wake
a review by Padraic Colum of Charles Duff’s Joyce and the Plain Reader
Gotham Book Mart’s advertisement for the Egoist Press edition of Ulysses and other works. (A personal note: I used to patronize the Gotham Book Mart.)
Contempo advertisement for the Random House Ulysses
Gerber concludes:
… Contempo III.13 is an important document in the Joyce and Ulysses history, with Gilbert’s recollection of Joyce’s rediscovery and iconic use of the monologue intérieur technique representing the immediate past, Cerf’s account of publishing Ulysses embodying the remarkable present, and Joyce’s excerpt from Finnegans Wake presaging the imminent future. From start to finish, the brilliance of Contempo III.13 is that it captures, in part, a sampling of the critical atmosphere at the initial high point of modern literature–that moment when Ulysses first burst upon the American scene, like a comet, a shooting star streaking across the literary sky.
— posted by Roger W. Smith
January 2022
James Joyce said of his father, John Stanislaus Joyce, “I got from him his portraits, a waistcoat, a good tenor voice, and an extravagant licentious disposition.” In Ulysses, Simon Dedalus is a version of the author’s father. While the fictional character is a bad provider for his family, leaving his daughters penniless, James Joyce also portrays Simon as witty and good company outside of his home, popular in bars and gifted with a wonderful tenor voice that soars in the novel’s “Sirens” episode. Of his father’s influence on the book, Joyce told a friend, “The humor of Ulysses is his; its people are his friends. The book is his spittin’ image.”’
— James Joyce exhibit, Morgan Library
I can relate to this portrayal.
— posted by Roger W. Smith
July 2022
Around 4 p.m. on Father’s Day.
I am sitting, rather bored, in a bar on Seventh Avenue.
I have a good view of the street.
It’s a lovely Sunday afternoon. A stream of pedestrians keeps passing by.
Where are they going?
Who knows? They themselves probably don’t.
They are walking on air. The energy of the City propels them along.
Multiple attractions, things to do. Oh, to be a part of it.
The path leading them wherever they choose.
– posted by Roger W. Smith
June 19, 2022
Eileen McCauley began her career as a French teacher at Canton High School in Canton, MA.
I had her for two years of French in my freshman and sophomore years. I loved her class.
She had a great influence on me, like most good teachers, in awakening and fostering in me a love for learning languages, for the languages themselves. It got me started on a lifelong course of language study which has been pure joy.
There were no audiovisual materials for language study online or at home back then. I would monologue and recite the French passages in my French textbook over and over again while doing my homework. I would assiduously apply myself to memorizing the vocabulary list at the end of each chapter.
I once said to my older brother, who also took French, that when I recited le train out loud, it seemed different to me than the English train. I asked him, is this the case with you too? He said, no, it didn’t.
— Roger W. Smith
June 2020
Oscar Wilde, ‘The Selfish Giant’
I read this beautiful story in my boyhood. It made a great impression on me, and it still moves me greatly, practically to tears.
— Roger W. Smith
When my father would get into an argument with his second wife Jan — my stepmother — he would, as she told me, grit his teeth and say, “I’m not going to let it ruin my day.”
We (siblings and stepmother) had a surprise birthday party at my father’s home on Cape Cod on his 65th birthday.
At the end of the day, after the guests had left, he said to us that he almost didn’t want to go to bed. He didn’t want his wonderful day to be over.
– posted by Roger W. Smith
June 2022
But th’heedfull Boateman strongly forth did stretch
His brawnie armes, and all his body straine,
That th’vtmost sandy breach they shortly fetch,
Whiles the dred daunger does behind remaine.
Suddeine they see from midst of all the Maine,
The surging waters like a mountaine rise,
And the great sea puft vp with proud disdaine,
To swell aboue the measure of his guise,
As threatning to deuoure all, that his powre despise.
The waues come rolling, and the billowes rore
Outragiously, as they enraged were,
Or wrathfull Neptune did them driue before
His whirling charet, for exceeding feare:
For not one puffe of wind there did appeare,
That all the three thereat woxe much afrayd,
Vnweeting, what such horrour straunge did reare.
Eftsoones they saw an hideous hoast arrayd,
Of huge Sea monsters, such as liuing sence dismayd.
Most vgly shapes, and horrible aspects,
Such as Dame Nature selfe mote feare to see,
Or shame, that euer should so fowle defects
From her most cunning hand escaped bee;
All dreadfull pourtraicts of deformitee:
Spring-headed Hydraes, and SEA-SHOULDRING WHALES,
Great whirlpooles, which all fishes make to flee,
Bright Scolopendraes, arm’d with siluer scales,
Mighty Monoceroses, with immeasured tayles.
— Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene: Book II, Canto xii
It was an image, which, figuratively speaking (according to my former professor Aileen Ward’s magnificent biography), overpowered the future poet John Keats in his late teens when he began to read avidly.
I took an English course in college (in which I somehow got the grade of B) — Literature of Transition: Classic to Romantic — in which we read The Faerie Queene. I could not get into Spenser and did not appreciate The Faerie Queene.
What a magnificent image. A man shoulders his way through a crowd, brushing aside others in his way. The whale swims the ocean, shouldering aside the waves.
–– posted by Roger w. Smith
June 2022
Chelovek v futlyare (The Man in a Case; read in the original)
Dama s sobachkoy (The Lady with a Dog; read in the original)
Above are recorded readings of two Chekhov stories: “The Man in a Case” and “The Lady with a Dog.”
Also, posted above as Word documents: the text of both stories in Russian and English.
— posted by Roger W. Smith
May 2022
Михаил Лермонтов
Выхожу один я на дорогу
Выхожу один я на дорогу;
Сквозь туман кремнистый путь блестит;
Ночь тиха. Пустыня внемлет богу,
И звезда с звездою говорит.
В небесах торжественно и чудно!
Спит земля в сиянье голубом…
Что же мне так больно и так трудно?
Жду ль чего? жалею ли о чём?
Уж не жду от жизни ничего я,
И не жаль мне прошлого ничуть;
Я ищу свободы и покоя!
Я б хотел забыться и заснуть!
Но не тем холодным сном могилы…
Я б желал навеки так заснуть,
Чтоб в груди дремали жизни силы,
Чтоб дыша вздымалась тихо грудь;
Чтоб всю ночь, весь день мой слух лелея,
Про любовь мне сладкий голос пел,
Надо мной чтоб вечно зеленея
Тёмный дуб склонялся и шумел.
Mikhail Lermontov
Alone I set out on the road
Alone I set out on the road;
The flinty path is sparkling in the mist;
The night is still. The desert harks to God,
And star with star converses.
The vault is overwhelmed with solemn wonder
The earth in cobalt aura sleeps. . .
Why do I feel so pained and troubled?
What do I harbor: hope, regrets?
I see no hope in years to come,
Have no regrets for things gone by.
All that I seek is peace and freedom!
To lose myself and sleep!
But not the frozen slumber of the grave…
I’d like eternal sleep to leave
My life force dozing in my breast
Gently with my breath to rise and fall;
By night and day, my hearing would be soothed
By voices sweet, singing to me of love.
And over me, forever green,
A dark oak tree would bend and rustle.
*****************************************************
This poem is recited from memory by Mikhail Gorbachev at the conclusion of Werner Herzog’s stupendous film Meeting Gorbachev.
–– posted by Roger W. Smith
May 2022
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addendum, June 1, 2022
Elisabeth van der Meer, host of the site A Russian Affair, has sent me a translation of Lermontov’s poem (which I regard as a better than the translation I posted) by Michael Longley:
Night-Walk
I come out alone onto the boreen,
A flinty path glimmering through mist,
Stilly night, wilderness listening to God,
The constellations in conversation,
Astonishing things up there in the sky,
The earth dozing in pale-blue radiance.
Why, then, am I so downhearted? What
Am I waiting for? What do I regret?
I’ve stopped expecting anything from life,
I don’t feel nostalgic about the past.
I long for freedom and tranquility,
I long for forgetfulness and sleep,
But not the grave’s spine-chilling coma.
I would prefer to fall asleep for ever
With the life force snoozing in my breast
As it rises and falls imperceptibly,
Night and day a kind voice soothing my ears
With affectionate lullabies about love
And over me, green for eternity,
A shadowy oak leaning and rustling.
— translated by Michael Longley